As soon as I saw Mrs. Meldrum I broke out to her. “Is there anything in
it? _Is_ her general health--?”
Mrs. Meldrum interrupted me with her great amused blare. “You’ve already
seen her and she has told you her wondrous tale? What’s ‘in it’ is what
has been in everything she has ever done--the most comical, tragical
belief in herself. She thinks she’s doing a ‘cure.’”
“And what does her husband think?”
“Her husband? What husband?”
“Hasn’t she then married Lord Iffield?”
“_Vous-en-êtes là?_” cried my hostess. “He behaved like a regular
beast.”
“How should I know? You never wrote to me.”
Mrs. Meldrum hesitated, covering me with what poor Flora called the
particular organ. “No, I didn’t write to you; and I abstained on
purpose. If I didn’t I thought you mightn’t, over there, hear what
had happened. If you should hear I was afraid you would stir up Mr.
Dawling.”
“Stir him up?”
“Urge him to fly to the rescue; write out to him that there was another
chance for him.”
“I wouldn’t have done it,” I said.
“Well,” Mrs. Meldrum replied, “it was not my business to give you an
opportunity.”
“In short you were afraid of it.”
Again she hesitated and though it may have been only my fancy I thought
she considerably reddened. At all events she laughed out. Then “I was
afraid of it!” she very honestly answered.
“But doesn’t he know? Has he given no sign?”
“Every sign in life--he came straight back to her. He did everything to
get her to listen to him; but she hasn’t the smallest idea of it.”
“Has he seen her as she is now?” I presently and just a trifle awkwardly
inquired.
“Indeed he has, and borne it like a hero. He told me all about it.”
“How much you’ve all been through!” I ventured to ejaculate. “Then what
has become of him?”
“He’s at home in Hampshire. He has got back his old place and I believe
by this time his old sisters. It’s not half a bad little place.”
“Yet its attractions say nothing to Flora?”
“Oh, Flora’s by no means on her back!” my interlocutress laughed.
“She’s not on her back because she’s on yours. Have you got her for the
rest of your life?”
Once more my hostess genially glared at me. “Did she tell you how much
the Hammond Synges have kindly left her to live on? Not quite eighty
pounds a year.”
“That’s a good deal, but it won’t pay the oculist. What was it that at
last induced her to submit to him?”
“Her general collapse after that brute of an Iffield’s rupture. She
cried her eyes out--she passed through a horror of black darkness. Then
came a gleam of light, and the light appears to have broadened. She went
into goggles as repentant Magdalens go into the Catholic Church.”
“Yet you don’t think she’ll be saved?”
“_She_ thinks she will--that’s all I can tell you. There’s no doubt that
when once she brought herself to accept her real remedy, as she calls
it, she began to enjoy a relief that she had never known. That feeling,
very new and in spite of what she pays for it most refreshing, has
given her something to hold on by, begotten in her foolish little mind
a belief that, as she says, she’s on the mend and that in the course of
time, if she leads a tremendously healthy life, she’ll be able to take
off her muzzle and become as dangerous again as ever. It keeps her
going.”
“And what keeps _you?_ You’re good until the parties begin again.”
“Oh, she doesn’t object to me now!” smiled Mrs. Meldrum. “I’m going
to take her abroad; we shall be a pretty pair.” I was struck with this
energy and after a moment I inquired the reason of it. “It’s to divert
her mind,” my friend replied, reddening again, I thought, a little. “We
shall go next week: I’ve only waited, to start, to see how your mother
would be.” I expressed to her hereupon my sense of her extraordinary
merit and also that of the inconceivability of Flora’s fancying herself
still in a situation not to jump at the chance of marrying a man like
Dawling. “She says he’s too ugly; she says he’s too dreary; she says in
fact he’s ‘nobody,’” Mrs. Meldrum pursued. “She says above all that he’s
not ‘her own sort.’ She doesn’t deny that he’s good, but she insists on
the fact that he’s grotesque. He’s quite the last person she would ever
dream of.” I was almost disposed on hearing this to protest that if the
girl had so little proper feeling her noble suitor had perhaps served
her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just how her noble
suitor _had_ served her got the better of that emotion, and I asked
a question or two which led my companion again to apply to him the
invidious epithet I have already quoted. What had happened was simply
that Flora had at the eleventh hour broken down in the attempt to
put him off with an uncandid account of her infirmity and that his
lordship’s interest in her had not been proof against the discovery of
the way she had practised on him. Her dissimulation, he was obliged to
perceive, had been infernally deep. The future in short assumed a new
complexion for him when looked at through the grim glasses of a bride
who, as he had said to some one, couldn’t really, when you came to find
out, see her hand before her face. He had conducted himself like any
other jockeyed customer--he had returned the animal as unsound. He had
backed out in his own way, giving the business, by some sharp shuffle,
such a turn as to make the rupture ostensibly Flora’s, but he had none
the less remorselessly and basely backed out. He had cared for her
lovely face, cared for it in the amused and haunted way it had been her
poor little delusive gift to make men care; and her lovely face, damn
it, with the monstrous gear she had begun to rig upon it, was just what
had let him in. He had in the judgment of his family done everything
that could be expected of him; he had made--Mrs. Meldrum had herself
seen the letter--a “handsome” offer of pecuniary compensation. Oh, if
Flora, with her incredible buoyancy, was in a manner on her feet again
now, it was not that she had not for weeks and weeks been prone in the
dust. Strange were the humiliations, the prostrations it was given to
some natures to survive. That Flora had survived was perhaps after all
a sort of sign that she was reserved for some final mercy. “But she has
been in the abysses at any rate,” said Mrs. Meldrum, “and I really don’t
think I can tell you what pulled her through.”
“I think I can tell _you_,” I said. “What in the world but Mrs.
Meldrum?”
At the end of an hour Flora had not come in, and I was obliged to
announce that I should have but time to reach the station, where, in
charge of my mother’s servant, I was to find my luggage. Mrs. Meldrum
put before me the question of waiting till a later train, so as not
to lose our young lady; but I confess I gave this alternative a
consideration less profound than I pretended. Somehow I didn’t care if I
did lose our young lady. Now that I knew the worst that had befallen
her it struck me still less as possible to meet her on the ground of
condolence; and with the melancholy aspect she wore to me what other
ground was left? I lost her, but I caught my train. In truth she was
so changed that one hated to see it; and now that she was in charitable
hands one didn’t feel compelled to make great efforts. I had studied
her face for a particular beauty; I had lived with that beauty and
reproduced it; but I knew what belonged to my trade well enough to be
sure it was gone for ever.